the little rat. The more I knew about him, the less frightful he was.
In the moonlight that slipped between the wall slats, I saw Mose tap Albert on the arm and spell out in sign, Norman?
“The old clerk at the hardware store was asking all kinds of questions,” Albert explained. “Said to Jack, ‘What’s the boy’s name?’ I told him I wasn’t a boy. Jack said I was no man neither. So I told the clerk my name was Norman. Neither boy nor man.”
Damn, that was smart, I thought. Me, when I was pressed, all I could come up with was some stupid movie cowboy’s name. Albert, he’d come up with a corker. I decided next time somebody asked me, I was going to give them a name just as slick as Norman.
* * *
BY OUR FOURTH morning with the pig scarer, we’d finished the work in the orchard, and he set us to painting the barn and tending the big garden. Except for the fact that we’d been locked in the tack room every night and fed only once a day, it hadn’t been that different from the work we’d done on the Frosts’ farm. We saw Emmy every evening at supper, and she seemed to be doing okay. After we ate, the pig scarer would bring out his fiddle and I would put my harmonica to my lips and we’d play tunes together. He didn’t seem to me to be a bad sort. It was just that life had been pretty cruel to him. He’d been visited by his own Tornado God.
I asked him one night about that eye patch he wore.
“Lost it fighting the Kaiser,” he said. “The war to end all wars. Ha!”
“You don’t believe it did any good?” Albert asked.
“There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have. A day don’t go by that there’s not war somewhere in this world. A war to end all wars? That’s like saying a disease to end all diseases. Only way that’ll happen is when every human being on this earth is dead.”
Mose signed, Not everybody’s greedy.
Emmy translated for the pig scarer.
“Boy, I never knew anybody didn’t have their own best interests at heart, and the hell with everyone else.” He scrutinized each one of us with his good eye. “Be honest. Given the chance to get yourselves free of me, you’d slit my throat, wouldn’t you?”
Although I’d killed a man already in order to be free, slitting the pig scarer’s throat was a sickening thought. “Not me,” I said.
The pig scarer drank the last of the alcohol he’d brought with him, eyed the clear, empty glass bottle, and flung it against the barn wall, where it shattered with an explosion that destroyed the fragile camaraderie the evening’s music had created.
“Let me tell you something, boy. Whatever you think you’re not capable of doing, the minute you think it, the moment it enters your mind, just in the imagining, it’s already been done. Only a matter of time before your hands follow through.”
He grabbed Emmy, yanked her to her feet, bolted the tack room door, and shut us up in the dark.
It rained all the next day, a steady drizzle, and the pig scarer had us working inside the barn, sharpening and oiling his tools, seeing to the fermenting whiskey mash, while he stayed in the house with Emmy. I took a good look at the broken-up cider press against the barn’s back wall. That cider press had been the object of some great rage. I’d been thinking about what the pig scarer said the night before, about the moment when something terrible comes into your head, that it’s only a matter of time before you do it. I couldn’t see into his head or his heart, but whatever was there, no matter how terrible, I figured the pig scarer was capable of it. I kept thinking about Aggie and Sophie and Rudy, and wondering more and more what had really happened to them. And all along I’d been trying to figure a way to escape.
That day, while eyeing everything in the barn, I finally had a decent idea. There was a roll of stiff, heavy wire hanging on the wall among the hand tools. I used a pair of cutters, clipped off a two-foot length, and made a hook at one end.
Mose signed, What doing?
“You’ll see. Albert, lock me in the tack room.”
When